We all have that one alias or shell function we’ve quietly copy-pasted into every new machine for years. The little quality-of-life trick that makes you irrationally happy every time it saves you three keystrokes.
Drop your favorite alias, one-liner, or shell function below and tell us what it does, bonus points if it’s something you cooked up yourself and didn’t just steal from a dotfiles repo (we won’t judge if you did though). 
alias ll="ls -lAhF --group-directories-first"
Nothing groundbreaking but having directories sorted to the top and hidden files visible by default just makes navigating so much smoother. I tried switching to eza at one point but honestly kept coming back to this.
Here are my favorites ones:
alias update=“sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade”
alias ls=“ls -alF”
believe it or not c is one of my most common alias commands.
alias c=‘clear;pwd’
I have various ls aliases that are also very frequently used, on Endeavour OS where I happen to be at the moment, here’s how I implemented them on this system.
alias l=‘ls -al’
alias ll=‘ls -l’
I vary those, depending on what I’m doing.
alias u is another VERY common alias that I use; again I alter this one depending on which distribution I’m using. On antiX, I use it with apt commands; here on Endeavour OS, the following:
alias u=‘yay -Syu’
alias cls=clear
alias ltr=‘ls -latr’
alias hello=‘cd; clear; fastfetch’
update=‘apt clean all; apt update; apt -y upgrade’
i have many alias for my favorite directorys like
vm
dock
data
dev
learn
alias ..=‘cd ..’
alias …=‘cd ../..’
alias …=‘cd ../../..’
alias home=‘cd ~’
alias root=‘cd /’
alias logs=‘cd /var/log’
alias topu=‘top -u $USER’
alias psa=‘ps aux’
@Blue_bird I love your alias commands. I may add a few of them to my collection.
Indeed, these are great guys. Thanks for sharing.
Will be referencing you guys in an article tomorrow:
The LinuxCommunity.io forum thread on favorite aliases and functions collected some solid contributions worth adding to your own setup. Here are the highlights.
toadie swaps ls for lsd, a modern ls replacement with icons and color output:
alias ls="lsd -lah --header"
toadie also uses short named aliases for frequently visited directories, one per project or location:
alias vm='cd ~/vm'
alias dock='cd ~/docker'
alias dev='cd ~/dev'
alias learn='cd ~/learn'
Once you have more than a handful of project directories, this pattern beats cd-ing through long paths every time.
I used a version of ll that sorts directories to the top:
alias ll="ls -lAhF --group-directories-first"
Small change from the standard ll, but having directories sorted above files makes scanning large directories noticeably faster.
Gopinath Pigili adds a few location shortcuts and a per-user top view:
alias home='cd ~'
alias root='cd /'
alias logs='cd /var/log'
alias topu='top -u $USER'
alias psa='ps aux'
topu is a neat one. It filters top to show only your own processes, useful on shared systems where other users’ processes clutter the output.
Brian Masinick keeps a simple c alias that clears the screen and prints the current directory in one shot:
alias c='clear;pwd'
He also uses a short u alias mapped to the update command for whichever distro he’s on at the time, swapping it out per machine. Same principle as the distro-specific update aliases covered above, just taken further.
J J Sloan has a hello alias that makes for a satisfying login sequence:
alias cls=clear
alias ltr='ls -latr'
alias hello='cd; clear; fastfetch'`
hello drops you to home, clears the screen, and fires fastfetch for a system info summary. Good for a fresh terminal orientation. ltr sorts files by modification time with the most recently changed at the bottom, useful when you want to see what changed and when.
I will go for that --group-directories-first option from now on! I am though using lt and lr for time-sorted listing.
What’s with everybody using a command to clear the screen? Don’t you have CTRL-L?
Video player of choice (legacy alias from when I used OMXPlayer):
alias o='mpv --fullscreen'
I guess this one gets used frequently without noticing it:
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
If I want to truncate a file but keep it around, so I know I had it:
alias zero='truncate -s 0'
To truncate a file and move it to a folder at the same time (I love this technique to do multi-line aliases):
alias zm='f(){ zero "$1"; mv "$1" "$2"; unset -f f; }; f'
Finally, go edit the aliases:
alias ba='sudo nano ~/.bash_aliases'
… and enable the updates made:
alias re_source='source ~/.bashrc'
It’s pretty obvious that the alias commands we use depend on the distributions we choose and the frequency of the commands that we utilize. I like many of the aliases that various people chose, but if I added them to my system I probably would not use them very much. Even among the aliases (and functions) that I wrote in my .bashrc I’ll admit that I probably use the top five or six of them every week, though I probably use most of them during the year.
I for one do NOT like intermingling of hidden and non-hidden files. Similarly, I don’t like mingling letters and special characters when sorting.
I am very particular with my sorting of files and directories at command line, so I use a couple of different things.
[1] This first is a function used by other alias definitions (to ensure uniform presentation of information, regardless of the displayed content encountered):
alias ndate='awk '\''{ pos=index( $0, $9 ) ; rem=substr( $0, pos ) ; printf("%s %3d %10s %10s %10d %3s %2d %5s %s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, rem ) ; } '\'' '
[2] Then, to list only directories, I have
alias ldir='find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -print | cut -c3- | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
[3] Similarly, for non-directory files, I have
alias lf='find . -maxdepth 1 \( ! -type d \) -print | cut -c3- | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
[4] To report only shell scripts in the current directory:
alias lsh='find . -maxdepth 1 \( -name "*.sh" -o -name "*.bash" \) -print | cut -c3- | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
[5] And again, for only symbolic links:
alias lsk='find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -print | cut -c3- | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
[6] To list everything, using that same formatting and ordering, I have:
alias lf='find . -maxdepth 1 \( ! -type d \) -print | cut -c3- | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
On the more complicated side, I have this script [Priority__Report.sh]:
#!/bin/sh
BASE=`basename "$0" ".sh" `
TMP=/tmp/${BASE}.proclist
rm -f ${TMP}
ps -eo pid,user:15,%cpu,ni,args >${TMP}
header="`head -1 ${TMP} `"
echo "${header}"
if [ "$1" = "--all" ]
then
tail -n +2 ${TMP}
else
tail -n +2 ${TMP} | awk '{ if( $4 != "-20" && index($5,"[kworker/") != 1 && index($5,"[ksoftirqd/") != 1 && index($5,"[jbd2/") != 1 && index($5,"[scsi_eh") != 1 && index($5,"[idle_inject") != 1 && index($5,"[migration") != 1 && index($5,"[cpuhp") != 1 ){ print $0 } ; }'
fi | sort -n --key=3.1,4.0 | sort --key=2.1,3.0
rm -f ${TMP}
[7] for which I use the following alias:
alias prio='/Oasis/bin/Priority__Report.sh'
[Edit:] While sharing the above, I noticed that I had a gap in my “reporting” aliases, one giving only the hidden files at current directory level. I just added this [8] to my environment:
alias ldot='find . -maxdepth 1 -print | cut -c3- | grep ^[.] | sort -V | xargs -I here ls -ld --color=always "here" | ndate '
Probably this one:
alias alsamixer='alsamixer -c 1'